1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to accessing resources (e.g., pages) over a network (e.g., over the Web using URLs), and more specifically to protecting a resource URL from being served without the base Web page also being served.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computational devices continue to proliferate throughout the world, there also continues to be an increase in the use of networks connecting these devices. Computational devices include large mainframe computers, workstations, personal computers, laptops and other portable devices including wireless telephones, personal digital assistants, automobile-based computers, etc. Such portable computational devices are also referred to as “pervasive” devices. The term “computer” or “computational device”, as used herein, may refer to any device which contains a processor and some type of memory. The networks connecting computational devices may be “wired” networks, formed using lines such as copper wire or fiber optic cable, wireless networks employing earth and/or satellite-based wireless transmission links, or combinations of wired and wireless network portions. Many such networks may be organized using a client/server architecture, in which “server” computational devices manage resources, such as files, peripheral devices, or processing power, which may be requested by “client” computational devices. “Proxy servers” can act on behalf of other machines, such as either clients or servers.
A widely used network is the Internet. The Internet, initially referred to as a collection of “interconnected networks”, is a set of computer networks, possibly dissimilar, joined together by means of gateways that handle data transfer and the conversion of messages from the sending network to the protocols used by the receiving network. When capitalized, the term “Internet” refers to the collection of networks and gateways that use the TCP/IP suite or protocols.
Currently, the most commonly employed method of transferring data over the Internet is to employ the World Wide Web environment, referred to herein as “the Web”. Other Internet resources exist for transferring information, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher, but have not achieved the popularity of the Web. In the Web environment, servers and clients effect data transfer using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a known protocol for handling the transfer of various data files (e.g., text, still graphic images, audio, motion video, etc.).
There are many sites on the Internet that have a collection of resources such as movies, pictures, music or other works of content. The web page author typically spends a significant amount of time updating and modifying the site. The Web site owner also incurs other costs in maintaining the Web site including, among other items, connection fees and server space. To cover these costs, the Web site owner will make arrangements with advertisers to place their advertisements at the Web site for a fee. The fee arrangement is typically based upon the number of users that visit the Web site. Without advertisers to provide the compensation to cover the costs of operating a Web site, the costs would be passed on the users through higher access fees and registration fees. As such, it s vital to the success of such a web site that any such advertisement be seen by each user that receives the benefit of the Web site through access to any of its content.
Unfortunately, it is common practice for other Web site owners to use the resources from an original Web site without linking to the original owner's Web page. Consequently, when a user clicks on the resource now referenced from the other Web site, the original Web site server will serve the resource. However, since there was no link to the original Web site, only the resource is served and not any of the original Web pages, including any Web pages that may have contained the advertisements. As such, that user would not be exposed to the advertisement. Without the user being exposed to the advertisement, and without the user being tracked as accessing the original Web site, the original Web site owner receives no credit for this user in conjunction with any advertisement arrangement or compensation.
Linking directly to a resource within a Web site without following the links from that Web site, such as from that Web site's Home page, is referred to as deep hyperlinking. Deep hyperlinks from one Web site point directly to resources, i.e., Web pages, or other content, of a different Web site. This may possibly result in bypassing the advertising-rich home pages or other identifying pages for the different Web site. As such, the original source, i.e., the content provider, of the content of a deep link can become obscure.
For clarification, a content provider is used herein to refer to the owner of the content that is being linked to; and a content aggregator is an entity that provides links to the sites of the content providers and may not necessarily provide any original content.
Consequently, legal controversies over deep linking have developed. On the one side, some believe that deep linking should be illegal. For example, intellectual property owners of content rich information, such as movie studios, believe that they have the right to protect their rights to their Web page content by not permitting others to link to their sites that contain copyrighted material without their specific authorization. They believe that property owners who create content should have a right to determine how others experience their Web site. Also, if advertising-rich home pages are bypassed, then the owner of those sites may suffer diminished revenue.
On the other hand, since linking is what the Web is all about, others believe that if links are banned or restrictions are put on linking, then the whole Internet would have to undergo a transformation. The whole point of the Web is for everything to be linked to everything else. The belief by some is that deep linking should be permissible because anyone who creates a Web page in effect grants the cyberspace community at large an implied license to link to it.
The controversies surrounding deep linking were exemplified in a lawsuit between a content provider and a content aggregator over such links. The content provider was an established business within the Internet environment and within the outside physical world. The content provider sold tickets to concerts, plays, sports events, and other events. A customer could buy tickets from the content provider through the Web, by the phone, and by physically going to other outlets. For example, the content provider had arrangements with music stores, shopping malls, and other locations to sell tickets at such given locations. To buy tickets over the Web, a user would access the content provider's home page, and follow links to purchase the desired tickets. While the customer traversed the applicable links from the home page to purchase the desired tickets, the user would see other events and any associated advertising for such other events. It appears that a content aggregator provided a city guide Web site that offered full service to customers which included links to the content provider to buy tickets. Although the content provider still received payment for tickets purchased from users via the content aggregator link, the content provider was not receiving the full benefit of being the owner of its Web site. That is, the content provider was not able to serve each of its customers in its own desired manner since the customers from the content aggregator were being lead deep into the content provider's site avoiding the information provided by the content provider on its home page and subsequent pages. As such, the content aggregator was drawing customers to its own site even though it did not provide the tickets through its own Web server, thereby generating additional advertising revenue for itself.
Currently, one way in which a content provider can protect access to particular information within its Web site is to grant authorization through the use of id's and passwords. If every user becomes authorized through each user's own password, at least the content provider has the means to know how many users are accessing the site and a form of identity of those users. The content provider can use this information as a means for compensation, i.e., by using subscription fees in exchange for authorization, or to use the identifying user information to send advertising promotions to in order to keep the content producer in business. As such, a content provider can protect access to particular information by using passwords which prevent just anyone from going deep inside their page unless authorized. Nevertheless, even if a user has supplied a password and is authorized, the user can still deep link within the authorized set of pages and bypass any required advertisements or other prerequisite information.
A problem with requiring password authorization is that if every content provider required passwords, then a user would have an unmanageable number of different passwords that the user would have to keep track of for all of the different possible content producers the user would access. As such, password authorization schemes on the Internet are burdensome to users, and do not provide the best approach in protecting resources from being served without a prerequisite resource from being served, also.